In the seventeenth century, school plays were performed in practically all schools in Slovakia, which was then part of Hungary. The first teacher to stage plays with his pupils was Leonard Stöckel in Bardejov (Bartfeld) in the second half of the sixteenth century. After Stöckel's death, plays continued to be performed in Bardejov, but—thanks to a body of teachers who took Jan Amos Comenius as their model in the field of dramatic art—it was the neighbouring town of Presov (Eperies) which became the centre of Protestant school theatre in Slovakia in the seventeenth century. Comenius was active in the years 1650–4 in nearby Sárospatak, in present-day Hungary, and it was there that he wrote his Schola Ludus and performed it with his pupils.

When Louis XIV died, in 1715, the Comédie-Française was a weakened institution. It had barely survived the lean years at the end of the reign, and although it was sufficiently endowed with good actresses, it could boast no charismatic leading male actor who by his very presence might restore its fortunes in the new confident era that was beginning. Indeed, the adverse competitive environment created by the bawdy and vivacious theatres of the fairs on the one hand, and by the ever-popular Académie Royale (or Opera) on the other, was soon exacerbated by the return to Paris of the Italian actors, recalled in 1716 after an absence of nineteen years. It was in this context that in 1720, after an absence of nearly three decades, there returned to the Paris stage one of the most admired actors of the previous century, Michel Baron.

In November 1909 William Archer wrote an article for McClure's Magazine in which he surveyed developments in the American theatre over the past twenty years. The most innovative work had been undertaken by non-commercial companies, such as Victor Mapes' Chicago repertory and Winthrope Ames' Castle Square Theatre in Boston, and in the universities: ‘Brander Matthews at Columbia, W. L. Phelps at Yale, and George P. Baker at Harvard’. These ventures took as their models Antoine's Théâtre Libre in Paris; the Freie Bühne in Berlin; J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre, the Stage Society, Vedrenne-Barker at the Court, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and Charles Frohman's proposed repertory company at the Duke of York's Theatre. However whereas in the 1890s the progressive theatre in America had been heavily dependent on the European repertoire of plays, when he returned in 1907 Archer found ‘the scene entirely changed’:

During the 1920s and 30s, several left-wing theatre movements developed in Britain, committed to creating a political discourse in venues and forms unknown within the existing cultural mainstream. Such organizations as The Workers′ Theatre Movement, Unity Theatre and Theatre of Action were all–to a greater or lesser extent–resolutely oppositional to the Establishment and outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship. In the early 40s the situation changed, as individuals and theatrical forms previously associated with the Left were adopted by the Establishment, most notably through ENSA and the BBC.

Skylight Theatre's productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Earl Bales Park in Toronto (1987 and 1989) situated Prospero on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, set the action during the late eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook—the period of the area's colonization—and cast Ariel and Caliban as Haida Indians, Canadian Aboriginal people.

Patrice Pavis offers an excellent analysis of ostension in his dictionary of theatre. Ostension (Latin ostendere, to show), he writes, is an essential feature of performance. The expression ‘theatrical ostension’ calls to mind quite naturally the notions of set, stage properties, body motions, and so on. In addition to purely visual elements, ostension also refers to verbal signals. But ostension is rarely total; one often sees only fragments of the dramatic world. Ostension is a relative notion modulated by elements that are not shown or not clearly shown. Synecdoche (the part for the whole) is one possible mode of ostension: the director suggests a complex reality by a characteristic detail: a crown for the King … Performance often resorts to metaphor: one element conjures up another. Pavis concludes that a stylistics or rhetoric of ostension would be a most precious tool for performance analysis.

Lawrence Stone, Princeton Professor Emeritus of History, has recently declared that ‘every cultural enterprise, even science, is at least in part a social construction’. Biologist Jay Gould vehemently agrees. ‘Science’, says Gould, ‘is done by individuals, whose conclusions are influenced by the beliefs they bring with them.’ The contamination factor is unavoidable. On the other hand, Erwin Schrodinger, the renowned quantum physicist, brought to biology experimental truths that may take us to the edge of the universe. For him, the contamination factor was intentional. Beginning in the 1940s, his work had a direct effect on the writings of Samuel Beckett.